Stead’s team will coordinate the efforts of the Colorado Office of Emergency Management, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and local partners as the state responds to flood damage in 17 counties along the Front Range and on the Eastern Plains, Hickenlooper said.

Stead has headed IHS, the global information and analysis company based in Douglas County, since 2000, when he was named the company’s executive chairman. He became the company’s CEO in 2006 after it went public, and held that position until stepping down in June. Stead retains the title of executive chairman at IHS, which employs 8,000 people working in 31 countries and has a market cap of $7.5 billion.

“This is truly an epic rebuilding effort,” Hickenlooper said at a Thursday press conference at the State Capitol.

“We want to recover and rebuild quickly, better and in the most efficient way possible. Jerre is the perfect person to help us design and deliver a coordinated response to this disaster,” he said.

Hickenlooper described a rebuilding effort that would include volunteers building homes for families who lost theirs to the rising water. Families that didn’t have flood insurance may get “at best” $30,000 in aid from FEMA, he said.

“We hope Colorado will be a national model for how a state recovers,” Hickenlooper said.

Hickenlooper said about 200 miles of state-owned roads are destroyed, and more miles of local roads have been damaged in counties and towns in the path of the rushing water. In Weld County alone, 120 bridges need to be fixed, he said.

About 17,000 homes have been damaged; 2,000 were washed away by the floods, he said.

Hickenlooper said CDOT is rushing to fixing damaged roads and bridges, focusing first on temporary fixes to create access to remote communities cut off by the floods. Long-term repairs will follow, he said.

Repairing roads on Colorado’s Eastern Plains are critical to allow farmers to get harvest from their fields to the markets, he said.

And rebuilding those roads may include upgrades or moving roads and infrastructure to a new location, he said.

“We have to rebuild better than we were before,” he said.

Hickenlooper also said he hadn’t ruled out asking Congress to approve an emergency aid package, akin to a package approved for states damaged by Hurricane Sandy.